Picasso
Picasso was born a Spaniard and, so they say, began to draw before he could speak. As an infant he was instinctively attracted to artist’s tools. In early childhood he could spend hours in happy concentration drawing spirals with a sense and meaning known only to himself. At other times, shunning children’s games, he traced his first pictures in the sand. This early self-expression held out promise of a rare gift. Málaga must be mentioned, for it was there, on 25 October 1881, that Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born and it was there that he spent the first ten years of his life. Picasso’s father was a painter and professor at the School of Fine Arts and Crafts. Picasso learnt from him the basics of formal academic art training. Then he studied at the Academy of Arts in Madrid but never finished his degree. Picasso, who was not yet eighteen, had reached the point of his greatest rebelliousness; he repudiated academia’s anemic aesthetics along with realism’s pedestrian prose and, quite naturally, joined those who called themselves modernists, the non-conformist artists and writers, those whom Sabartés called “the élite of Catalan thought” and who were grouped around the artists’ café Els Quatre Gats. During 1899 and 1900 the only subjects Picasso deemed worthy of painting were those which reflected the “final truth”; the transience of human life and the inevitability of death. His early works, ranged under the name of “Blue Period” (1901-1904), consist in blue-tinted paintings influenced by a trip through Spain and the death of his friend, Casagemas. Even though Picasso himself repeatedly insisted on the inner, subjective nature of the Blue Period, its genesis and, especially, the monochromatic blue were for many years explained as merely the results of various aesthetic influences. Between 1905 and 1907, Picasso entered a new phase, called “Rose Period” characterised by a more cheerful style with orange and pink colours. In Gosol, in the summer of 1906 the nude female form assumed an extraordinary importance for Picasso; he equated a depersonalised, aboriginal, simple nakedness with the concept of “woman”. The importance that female nudes were to assume as subjects for Picasso in the next few months (in the winter and spring of 1907) came when he developed the composition of the large painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Just as African art is usually considered the factor leading to the development of Picasso’s classic aesthetics in 1907, the lessons of Cézanne are perceived as the cornerstone of this new progression. This relates, first of all, to a spatial conception of the canvas as a composed entity, subjected to a certain constructive system. Georges Braque, with whom Picasso became friends in the autumn of 1908 and together with whom he led Cubism during the six years of its apogee, was amazed by the similarity of Picasso’s pictorial experiments to his own. He explained that: “Cubism’s main direction was the materialisation of space.” After his Cubist period, in the 1920s, Picasso returned to a more figurative style and got closer to the surrealist movement. He represented distorted and monstrous bodies but in a very personal style. After the bombing of Guernica during 1937, Picasso made one of his most famous works which starkly symbolises the horrors of that war and, indeed, all wars. In the 1960s, his art changed again and Picasso began looking at the art of great masters and based his paintings on ones by Velázquez, Poussin, Goya, Manet, Courbet and Delacroix. Picasso’s final works were a mixture of style, becoming more colourful, expressive and optimistic. Picasso died in 1973, in his villa in Mougins. The Russian Symbolist Georgy Chulkov wrote: “Picasso’s death is tragic. Yet how blind and naïve are those who believe in imitating Picasso and learning from him. Learning what? For these forms have no corresponding emotions outside of Hell. But to be in Hell means to anticipate death. The Cubists are hardly privy to such unlimited knowledge”.
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Foreword
“People want to find “meaning” in everything and everyone. That is the disease of our age, an age that is anything but practical but believes itself to be more pratical than any other age.”
Picasso
Pablo Picasso, Photograph, 1904
Dedicated to Suzanne and Henri Bloch
Biography
1881: Birth of Pablo Ruiz Picasso in Málaga. Parents: José Ruiz Blasco, a teacher of drawing at the School of Fine Arts and Crafts and curator of the local museum, and Maria Picasso y Lopez.
1888–89: The first of little Pablo’s paintings, Picador.
1895: In Madrid, at the Prado he discovers Velázquez and Goya. Enrols at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, popularly called “La Lonja”. His father rents a studio for him. Paints his first large academic canvas, First Communion.
1899: In Barcelona joins a group of avant-garde intellectual artists who frequent the café Els Quatre Gats. Modernist tendencies appear in his works. Paints The Last Moments.
1900: The Last Moments is exhibited at the Paris Exposition Universelle.
1901: Publishes the review Arte Joven. Development of pre-Fauvist style (Cabaret Period). Exhibition of 65 of his works at the Galerie Vollard. Friendship with Max Jacob. Influenced by Lautrec and Van Gogh. The Casagemas death cycle. First Blue paintings.
1902: Develops Blue style in Barcelona.
1904: Moves into the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre. End of Blue Period. Takes up engraving. Friendship with Apollinaire and Salmon. Meets Fernande Olivier.
1905: Exhibits at Galerie Serrurier (travelling circus themes). Completes the large canvas Family of Saltimbanques. End of the Circus Period.
1906: Rose Classicism. Gertrude Stein introduces Picasso to Matisse. Meets André Derain. Summer in Gosol. That autumn in Paris: paints a self-portrait reflecting Iberian archaic sculpture.
1907: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. That summer visits the ethnographic museum at Palais du Trocadéro, where he discovers for himself African sculpture. Meets Kahnweiler and Georges Braque.
1908: Proto-Cubism. The term “Cubism” is born.
1909: From May to September works in Horta de Ebro, develops Analytical Cubism.
1910: “High” phase of Analytical Cubism. Nine works shown in London, in the Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition.
1912: Makes his first collage, Still-Life with Chair Caning. Transition of Cubism to Synthetic phase. First papiers collés and constructions.
1914: Rococo Cubism combines with Cubist structures in a foreshadowing of Surrealist methods.
1915: “Ingres” portraits.
1917: Joins the Diaghilev troupe in Rome, works on décor and costumes for the ballet Parade. Meets ballerina Olga Khokhlova (1891–1955).
1918: Wedding of Picasso and Olga (12 July). Death of Apollinaire (9 November). Moves to 23, rue La Boétie.
1919: Trip to London (May-August): design décor and costumes for the ballet Le Tricorne (by Manuel de Falla).
1921: Birth of son Paulo (4 February). Continues to work for Diaghilev (Cuadro Flamenco). Neo-Classicism.
1925: Works in Monte Carlo for the Ballets Russes. Paints The Dance.
1927: In January meets seventeen-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter. Theme of biomorphic bathers. First etchings for Le Chef-d’œuvre Inconnu by Balzac.
1928: Executes the huge collage Minotaur. Studio theme appears in his painting, and welded constructions in sculpture (aided by Julio González).
1930: Crucifixion based on Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. Series of etchings illustrating Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
1932: Major retrospective (236 works) in Paris and Zurich. Lives and works at Boisgeloup: “Biomorphic metamorphic” style. Zervos publishes the first volume of the Picasso Catalogue Raisonné.
1933: First issue of the Surrealist magazine Minotaure. Bullfight and female toreador themes. Fernande Olivier publishes her memoirs, Picasso et Ses Amis. Also published is Bernhard Geiser’s Catalogue Raisonné.
1935: Engraves Minotauromachy. That summer completely abandons painting in favour of writing. Birth of Maia, daughter of Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter. Jaime Sabartés, becomes his companion and secretary.
1936: Friendship with Paul Eluard. Beginning of the Civil War in Spain (18 July); the Republican Government appoints him director of the Prado Museum. Meets Dora Maar, who becomes his mistress. Together they discover the town of Vallauris, a nearby ceramics centre.
1937: Finds new studio at 7, Rue de Grands-Augustins, where he works on Guernica throughout May.
1938: Women at Their Toilette. Series of seated women (Dora) and portraits of children (Maia).
1939: Death of Picasso’s mother in Barcelona (13 January). Barcelona and Madrid fall. Guernica exhibited in America. Outbreak of World War II finds him in Paris. Leaves for Royan, where he stays, on and off, until December. Major retrospective, Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
1943: Makes the acquaintance of the young painter Françoise Gilot.
1945: Paints the anti-war The Charnel House
